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Noel Gallagher about Chris Martin: “He is a friend of mine!”

During an interview with Esquire, Noel Gallagher talked about Chris Martin, Oasis, his party life!

8 | “You can’t download spirit”

I’m never going to sell out Wembley Stadium on my own. Oasis could do 15 nights at the drop of a fucking hat but that’s not what drives me now. I’m driven to make what I do now the best that it can be.

I won’t say a word to an audience for two hours if I can’t be fucking bothered. If you don’t like it then don’t come next time.

The gig will never die because you can’t download it. You can’t download spirit. And, so, for the likes of me who persevered from an early age to play the fucking guitar and write songs and practice and practice and practice, I’ll be fine. God help fucking Zayn Malik.

Money is like drugs. What drugs do to you is whatever you are in your core, they just magnify. If you’re depressed, drugs will magnify that. If you’re a worrier, drugs will magnify that. If you’re paranoid, drugs will magnify that. Same with money. Now, I’m none of those things. I’m a party person. I live in the fucking moment. I have no conscience. I don’t fucking care. I look after me and my family. That’s it. So money is fucking great. And do you know what the best thing about it is? I earned every fucking penny. I didn’t win it in the lottery. If I hadn’t have written those songs, I wouldn’t be where I am today. That’s the bottom line. So, I fucking enjoy it as much as I can.

One of the things my missus says, “You’re a fucking bizarre individual.” She says, “You just don’t give a fuck, do you?”

People are wary about what they say now, for fear of social media. I pity people who fucking practice in the court of public opinion. When people would interview me I didn’t give a fuck. And it wasn’t studied not-giving-a-fuck. [Mimsy voice] “Oh no, I don’t give a fuck.” I genuinely didn’t care what people thought and I still to this day don’t care what people think of me. There’s a bit of my brain that’s missing.

Chris Martin is a friend of mine. That fucking guy can write a tune. And he’s hilarious, by the way. We were out one night having dinner, me and my missus, him and his missus, and he ended up banging his hand on the table, shouting at me: “Why do you think it’s so cool not to give a fuck?” Because he does give a fuck. About everything. I might have been making some disparaging comment about fucking Madonna or someone, and he was like, “I just can’t believe you can be like that.” And I was like, “Fucking believe it, man, because I can’t believe you can be like that.”

Every ludicrous thing I’ve ever said, I accepted the consequences because I don’t think I’ve ever said, “Oh, it was taken out of context, that.” Fucking wankers say that.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe there’s an all-seeing Somebody guiding the universe because if there was, clearly, there wouldn’t be such a thing as Isis. And I don’t mean the Bob Dylan song. In that sense, I’m a man of science. The Big Bang, that all sounds a lot more plausible to me.

How do I explain my success? I think that the people see something in what I do and what we did that maybe we still don’t see. I’ve had people outside crying. Still to this day, crying. And I still don’t understand that. So, I think people put something onto us that they wanted to see in themselves.

It’s nice to do things like this from time to time because I never really talk about it with anybody else. Nobody else was there. I’m the last man standing.

When I talk to Weller, he’s just slagging people off because he just fucking hates everyone. Bono, though, he’s great at summing things up. He said to me, “As long as your shit’s great, you don’t have to be.” I thought, “That’s so true. I don’t have to be anything other than myself, as long as the songs are great. And if the songs are great, no one’s really fucking interested about me so I can just do what the hell I want.”

When you make mistakes is when you think that it’s you that’s great and that anything you do must be great by definition, because it’s you who’s doing it. Not true. I learned that lesson very fucking quickly.

I don’t chase it anymore. I used to write constantly. Weller said to me one night, “Look, just don’t.” It went away from him for years. I said, “How’d you deal with that?” He said, “Just don’t chase it. If it’s going to come back it’ll come back. And if it doesn’t come back, would you be happy if you never wrote another song?” I think if I never wrote another song I could look back and think that some of the songs that I wrote really made a difference. They didn’t change the world but they made a difference to people. People fucking love those songs. So I would be happy.

Retiring? I don’t know what I’d do. It’s quite sad, really. I don’t have anything else that I’m remotely interested in other than music and football and my family. And that’s it.

I’m proud of three things, maybe four things. To get to this age and not have dyed my hair is a major achievement. No earrings. No tattoos. And no motorbike.